


Life Is Simple in the Moonlight

by waketosleep



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M, I just broke in to say "I love you", Lucid Dreaming, Sleeping Pill-Induced Confusion, secret meetings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5050240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waketosleep/pseuds/waketosleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donald was tired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Is Simple in the Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Had to write this after getting through s03e03 because this Liz/Ressler _Fugitive_ thing that I see building is GOING TO MAKE ME EXPLODE and Ressler is so, so bitter and everyone has such manpain.

Donald was tired.

He was tired of being the boss. Tired of Samar’s suspicious looks and Aram’s hangdog ones. Tired of watching doors swing shut behind Liz just before he got to her and then having to go back to the drawing board _again_ , waiting and watching for her and Red to make another mistake and pop up on his radar so he could try to move just that little bit faster this time, close the gap a little more. He was tired of hearing from the director about all the heat she was keeping off his back because she was sure he was the best man for this job, but someone somewhere needed results and he wasn’t producing more than a trail of near-misses.

He also, naturally, couldn’t fucking sleep anymore.

He stared blearily at his bathroom mirror, taking in his puffy, red-rimmed eyes and the downturn of his mouth, and glanced to double-check he’d taken off his shoulder holster, because his back was trying to tell him angrily that he was still wearing it. Donald sighed and opened the cabinet behind the mirror to shake a zopiclone out of the prescription bottle. He swallowed it dry rather than expend the energy on finding a cup to drink from and hit the bathroom light with his palm on the way out, rubbing at his face with the other hand as he dragged himself over to the bed.

By the time he was settled and had the pillow punched into an acceptable shape, his eyelids were starting to drag down already. He couldn’t fault the drugs for their ability to knock him out, leery as he’d been to start taking more prescription pills. He just hoped to anything listening that the vivid, crazy dreams stayed away tonight. His last thought after that was that the milk in the fridge probably needed to be thrown out, and then he was in oblivion.

“Ressler,” he heard.

He hated dreaming about her. This was not okay.

“Ressler,” she hissed again, and there he was in bed, and she was standing there in the dark. 

Donald had always been a lucid dreamer, brain drugs or no. “Get out,” he muttered into the pillow. “Let some part of my day not be about you.”

She stepped closer to the bed and was limned in moonlight, wearing the same clothes he’d seen on surveillance footage that afternoon. She’d just gone redhead--the dark, clearly from a bottle kind--hair stuffed up in a hat in deference to the cold lately. He felt like he could reach out and touch her, she was so real and closer than she’d been in months. He didn’t.

“Sorry I’m taking over your life,” she said, sounding vaguely amused. “Although that’s at least as much your fault as mine.” She was so close that her leg was touching the bed, now. Donald wondered where this shitty, awkward dream was going.

“Oh,” he said, rising to the bait, “so it’s my fault you killed the Attorney General and shot a cop and went on the run with your weird father-figure. Great. Should I apologize, Keen?” He was still lying mostly on his stomach, curling in a little as he shifted his head away from the pillow to look up at her. 

There was a short silence. “This is not going like I planned,” she said.

“What did you plan?” he asked drowsily.

“I just--I needed to see you, Ressler. No badges, no burner phones, no bullshit cat and mouse game for once. I wanted to talk to you.” She looked him over. “You don’t seem to be in much state for talking.”

“You break into my home in the middle of the night, don’t be surprised I’m in my jammies, Liz.” The edges of his vision were fuzzing gently and he snuggled back into his pillow, ready for this dream to be over. Colours curled into the dark around them, muted but nice. “When does Reddington appear in this tableau?”

“He doesn’t,” she said, a brow furrow coming through in her voice. “I came alone.”

Donald tried to think himself into an empty bedroom and get out of this dream, maybe even go the brutal way and have his service weapon materialize in his hand so he could get rid of dream-Liz some way or another, but aside from his mouth being able to move freely he was stuck passively in this dream. The edge of the bed dipped a little near his bent knee and she was sitting, leaning over him.

He’d had dreams go this way before. She’d keep leaning and then there would be a lot of skin and he’d wake up flushed, embarrassed, and possibly still hard.

But she didn’t keep leaning. She hovered, mostly upright, bracing one hand on the bed and more-or-less maintaining personal space as she stared down at him.

“I miss you,” she said suddenly, and then he caught a fleeting look of shock on her face in the silvery light from the window, as if she hadn’t meant to say it.

“That why you came through the kitchen window?” he asked.

“I miss what we had,” she went on, her voice creaking a little. They were both still speaking quietly, like they were sharing secrets.

“Our partnership is over,” he said, rolling onto his back. He wanted to sit up but his limbs were all too heavy in this dream. This was frustrating. “You ended it when you murdered Connolly.”

“Did I end everything?” she asked, looking for something in his face. She didn’t seem to be finding it.

Donald really didn’t need his brain to dredge up all these insecurities on a night like this. He really did not. “I don’t see how you can fix this, Keen, even with Red’s help,” he said finally.

“You really do think I’m a killer. A criminal, a traitor.”

“I hope you’re not,” Donald mumbled, his lips going numb. She was starting to drift away in the dark and he panicked, grabbing for her hand and catching it by the fingers. It felt warm and real, the skin a little rough from the cold.

She met him halfway and kissed his numb lips, smiled into it as he fumbled back and let go of her hand to comb his fingers through her terrible dyed hair (why couldn’t he dream about her with her own hair, zopiclone dreams were terrible) and she pressed him back into his pillow, crawling up the bed over him. Her hat fell off and landed somewhere behind her and she slid a hand across his chest and toward his shoulder while his own fingers cradled the back of her head. Her knee, braced on the bed, made the mattress dip a little and rolled him toward her in a way that oriented the kiss even better, although his mouth was still numb and wouldn’t cooperate.

When Liz broke the kiss, she pressed her forehead to his chest for a moment and he could smell coconut shampoo in her hair, nearly pressed against his nose. He breathed it in slowly.

“I have to go,” she said, throaty, and he let her slide from his grip. The dream was already getting away from him. Donald felt so heavy. She said something else as it all faded away but he couldn’t remember the words.

His alarm clock was like a hammer to the face. He grunted awake and sat up slowly, rubbing at his still-dry eyes and then reaching out to slap the alarm into silence. He didn’t feel as rested as he usually did after taking his pills. He could vaguely remember restless dreams, dreams about Keen. No endless car chases or running through a labyrinth of closing doors after her or that recurring one of holding her in his lap while she bled out, though, this time. He had a flash of kissing. A sex dream, he guessed, and sighed through his nose before sliding out of bed to face the day.

He stepped on something soft and looked down. It was grey. Donald picked it up off the floor.

It was the hat Liz had been wearing yesterday in the tapes he’d reviewed. It had to be; there was still a bottle-red hair clinging to the edge of it.

 

THE END


End file.
